Brinkley 1 Kyla Brinkley Spenser Simrill English 2340 Fall 2014 17
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Brinkley 1 Kyla Brinkley Spenser Simrill English 2340 Fall 2014 17 December 2014 Final Exam “You Are Okay” “All say, ‘How hard it is that we have to die’—a strange complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.” —Mark Twain, Puddn’head Wilson I write because I cannot draw. Because I was not blessed with the ability to convey the thoughts in my mind through graphic images, I instead paint pictures with words, stringing them together to convey feelings and ideas that previously had no concrete form. The urge to convey those feelings is true of many writers: it is why they write. A literary work is essentially a window into a point in time, paused, in order to be shared and analyzed by generations of people much later. In the sense of this paused point in time, literary works are essentially photographs, or even time capsules. In opening one of these time capsules, the reader is immersed in the world that the writer created and invited to share their experiences and sentiments just as they occurred because photographs freeze time in the past yet they raise awareness to who we are and who we will become. This awareness comes from common themes that arise due to the inescapable dialogue between books that speaks for the connection all humans have with one another Brinkley 2 regardless of the era in which they live, and the common trait that we all share: we have had to live, and we will have to die eventually. Literature addresses and embraces this in an enduring dialogue between literary works of art that reassures us that our struggles are universal. All writers share the need to depict images as frozen photographs in order to leave something for later generations and communicate with them. They feel the need to express an idea or a message about their time before it is forgotten in lost as the years flash by. Mark Twain wrote Puddn’head Wilson for this purpose. He wished to expose and satirize the Southern aristocracy the 19th century for those who were just starting to forget about what had happened forty years ago. When he wrote the novel, it already served as a reminder for the people of his time about the injustice of slavery that had been part of such recent American history, but it also serves as a snapshot into the shifting nature of Twain’s time. Twain’s opinions showed that blacks were just like any other person and that a white man raised as a slave (Chambers) could be no more intelligent than his black counterparts. Likewise, a slave raised as a white heir, like Tom, could become a self-interested villain simply because of the manner in which he was raised. Twain’s novel drips with irony concerning the racial hierarchy of the Old South that is amusing even for readers today. At the end of the novel when Tom and Chambers are exposed for being switched and thus the opposite race, Twain described how “Everybody granted that if ‘Tom’ were white and free it would be unquestionably right to punish him—it would be no loss to anybody; but to shut up a valuable slave for life—that was quite another matter. As soon as the Governor understood the case, he pardoned Tom at once, and the creditors sold him down the river….” (Twain) The ideas depicted here were considered wildly outrageous for both Twain’s original audience and later generations of readers, which support’s Twain’s “photograph” of the time. By instilling such irony into the novel, Twain forces the reader to step back from the story Brinkley 3 and realize that it is not a story at all, but a social criticism. Upon stepping back from an immersion into a writer’s story, the reader is forced to evaluate his or her own world in regard to the one depicted in the book. Twain included that “he was a fairly humane man towards slaves and other animals” in his initial description of Driscoll, Chambers’ and Roxy’s master. This causes a shock for readers, who are dragged deeper and deeper by Twain into the world of men such as Driscoll, realizing that Twain writes about real sentiment that is an enduring part of our history that we must acknowledge. It causes the reader to wonder what would happen should they actually have lived in Driscoll’s time, because this is the feeling that Twain instills. As time continues its relentless journey people all have experiences and these experiences overlap and can be seen in different places at different times yet they have the same foundation. This foundation is the root of the relatability of works such as Puddn’head Wilson and later ones such as Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Written in 1925, The Sun Also Rises describes the adventures of members of the “Lost Generation” of young people living in post-World War I America (such as Hemingway himself). Characterized by feelings of purposelessness and aimlessness, this group of individuals was described by Gertrude Stein to Hemingway: “In A Moveable Feast, which was published after Hemingway and Stein were both dead and after a literary feud that lasted much of their life, Hemingway reveals that the phrase was actually originated by the garage owner who serviced Stein's car. When a young mechanic failed to repair the car in a way satisfactory to Stein, the garage owner told her that while young men were easy to train, he considered those in their mid-twenties to thirties, the men who had been through World War I, to be a ‘lost generation’—une génération perdue. Stein, in telling Hemingway the story, added, ‘That is what you are. That's what you all are...all of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation.’” (“The Lost Generation”) Brinkley 4 The idea of feeling lost, however, was definitely not new for this generation of people, and can be seen in countless personal experiences and other literary works. Even returning back to Puddn’head Wilson, Tom’s struggle with his sense of self played a large role in the novel: “For as much as a week after this, Tom imagined that his character had undergone a pretty radical change. But that was because he did not know himself…In several ways his opinions were totally changed, and would never go back to what they were before, but the main structure of his character was not changed, and could not be changed”. (Twain) His mother Roxy also voiced the internal struggles of self-image and purpose that many of the characters in the novel experienced by addressing their light skin: “Jes listen to dat! If I’s imitation, what is you? Bofe of us is imitation white—dat’s what we is—en pow’ful good imitation, too…We don’t ‘mount to noth’in as imitation niggers…” (Twain) I believe Roxy’s opinion is especially important because there remain issue today in regard to passing: passing as in passing for something you are not. In reality, literature reminds us that we are all human and we share the same struggles anyway, and we can relate to the struggles of one another. In Charles Chesnutt’s The Passing of Grandison, the struggle of identity is explored in a relatable snapshot into the politics of Southern aristocracy, as in Twain’s novel, in a collection of stories published in 1901 entitled The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line. Chesnutt himself being of mixed descent, “was born two years before the Civil War…” and “…gew up in a turbulent sociopolitical atmosphere, and experienced the futile attempts of Reconstruction of Southern states.” (“Charles W. Chesnutt”) He understood the issue described by Roxy, stating that “I occupy here a position similar to that of Mahomet’s Coffin. I am neither fish, flesh, nor fowl-neither ‘nigger,’ white, nor ‘buckrah.’ Too ‘stuck-up’ for the colored folks, and, of course, not recognized by the whites.” (“Charles W. Chesnutt”) This struggle for identity fueled stories such as The Passing of Brinkley 5 Grandison that explored the idea of seemingly being someone you are not. Although Grandison’s role as a devoted slave turned out to be a façade, it demonstrated a very real side of the conflicts between abolitionists and slaves. Most of us hear more often of the struggles of slaves who yearned to be free rather than a slave wishing to evade freedom, as Grandison demonstrated. His vehement loyalty is shown in this dialogue: “I should just like to know, Grandison, whether you don't think yourself a great deal better off than those poor free negroes down by the plank road, with no kind master to look after them and no mistress to give them medicine when they're sick and – and” - "Well, I sh'd jes' reckon I is better off, suh, dan dem low-down free niggers, suh! (Chesnutt 178) It offers a parallel that increases insight into the realistic moral conflicts of enslaved people in the Old South that is nonetheless relatable for readers today. When slavery was all a person knew, it was surprising yet logical to realize that the prospect of freedom seemed daunting. Any reader today knows that new experiences can be frightening, which allows them to relate to even a slave like Grandison. However, finding Grandison’s fear of freedom so ridiculous throughout the story forces the reader to realize that his or her own fears of the unknown are just as obsurd.